Conflict Kitchen is a restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. Each Conflict Kitchen iteration is augmented by events, performances, and discussions that seek to expand the engagement the public has with the culture, politics, and issues at stake within the focus country. The restaurant rotates identities every few months in relation to current geopolitical events.

Our current Afghan version introduces our customers to the food, culture, and politics of Afghanistan. Developed in collaboration with Afghans in Pittsburgh and Afghanistan, our food comes packaged in wrappers that include interviews with Afghans on subjects ranging from culture to politics. As is to be expected, the thoughts and opinions that come through the interviews and our programming are often contradictory and complicated by personal perspective and history. These natural contradictions reflect a nuanced range of thought within each country and serves to instigate questioning, conversation, and debate with our customers.

Operating seven days a week in the middle of the city, Conflict Kitchen uses the social relations of food and economic exchange to engage the general public in discussions about countries, cultures, and people that they might know little about outside of the polarizing rhetoric of governmental politics and the narrow lens of media headlines. In addition, the restaurant creates a constantly changing site for ethnic diversity in the post-industrial city of Pittsburgh, as it has presented the only Iranian, Afghan, and Venezuelan restaurants the city has ever seen. Upcoming iterations will focus on the U.S. involved boarder conflicts of North/South Korea and Palestine/Israel.

Conflict Kitchen raised $4,178 from 139 backers in Kickstarter. You can check it out here!

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Conflict Kitchen

The restaurant operates seven days a week, and the venue itself is frequently changed to reflect the ethnic diversity of the restaurant’s cuisine and the diversity of the city itself. Conflict Kitchen is also the only food establishment in the city of Pittsburgh to feature Iranian, Afghan and Venezuelan food. Bon Appétit!

We grabbed a couple of drinks and sweet treats here and it was delicious! Seems like the food fair changes from time to time. Currently it's Cuban based foods. They give you neat little info sheets on the country they're featuring and it's a good spot to sit outside and picnic. It's not visible from the road, but it's in between the carousel and the grass field in the heart of the University of Pittsburgh.